Daniel D. Fox
Explorer
A richly-developed "real fantasy" world, but all of their products read very poorly. They read a lot like a textbook.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Kalamar - first published 4e setting?!?
- Thread starter mhensley
- Start date
Voadam
Legend
Correct, it was not a complaint about excess syllables, it was a complaint about style choice.
Hong's complaint though, I thought, was not that Kalamar has unrealistic sounding foreign fantasy place and people names. The complaint was that the names were offputting.
I had no problem when I thought Geoff was pronounced "Jee off". When I heard it was pronounced "Jeff" it did give me a dissonance jarring feel for it. Knowing real life places like Maryland and Virginia with Prince Geroge's county and Prince William county does not change the dissonance of the Grand Duchy of Geoff in Oerik.
Similarly, some find the greyhawk naming convention of original player name anagrams or taking a name and repeating it ad nauseum with just one letter different to be offputting in a campaign setting.
Also the fact that Intercourse is a real name of a place in the real world does not make it any less silly IMO.
Jolly_Blackburn
First Post
wait a minute. Is the message here that gamers have different tastes when it comes to campaign settings? Hence -- that's why there's so many of 'em? 
GeorgeFields
Explorer
What have you got against GeoFF.......ields...
wait a minute. Is the message here that gamers have different tastes when it comes to campaign settings? Hence -- that's why there's so many of 'em?
INCONCEIVABLE!!
thundershot
Adventurer
Please?
I don't believe it puts WotC in any position whatsoever, personally. It certainly shouldn't surprise anyone who's been at WotC for a while. We've been publishing D&D-compatible material for nearly 15 years now, and were even doing so (Goods and Gear, for example) at the same time we were publishing official material with the D&D logo.
We never used the OGL, and don't see any more reason to use the GSL, either. We'd like to keep supporting both v3.5 and 4E.
EDIT: Heck, I just added a brand new 101-page v3.5-compatible PDF (Zoa: Citadel of the Bay to our web store.
*chants while Mark and Jolly are around*
4E Goods & Gear.... 4E Goods & Gear... 4E Goods & Gear....
Chris
Wow! I was told this forum was civil.
thundershot
Adventurer
It is civil, but man.... Ya gotta read the threads before asking questions that may or may not have already been answered a few times in said thread.
Welcome, by the way!
Chris
Thanks. Sorry I do not know any business by forum names so don't know a thing of what may or may not be official or otherwise just a random thought.
Is there somewhere that usernames are listed for actual officials of representative companies?
Like a list of industry professionals here that gives the username of them so you can refer back to it in the heat of reading a thread through?
I think those names are stupid.
Being consistent with itself does not mean the setting has to have so much lack of vocals!
It's crazy!
The same thing the guy said about X place sounding different because they decided to put less vocals could have been done with other phonetic metaphors, without alienating people.
I say this because I KNOW how it feels in a constant basis. We play in spanish. Almost all roleplay literature is in English.
I do my share of hard work translating names to spanish (my first language): Fallcrest, Rivenfall, Waterdeep, Tardrum, Teiradrion. I know they work in English but not in spanish. If everything we did was in English it would work, but changing between them sometimes doesn't. So here come the Crestaverde, Rio Largo, Honda el Agua, Tarkon, Tercanon, etc.
The english language is very high. Latin languages have more graves in them.
Sometimes they sound stupid but if you think about Buenos Aires, Aguascalientes, Colorado... real names exist like that.
The point I am trying to make is... I have to do all of this because the roleplaying language is English. English speakers SHOULDN'T go what I go through. It's kind of obtuse if you ask me.
(I know how to speak spanish, english, japanese and russian...)
Being consistent with itself does not mean the setting has to have so much lack of vocals!
It's crazy!
The same thing the guy said about X place sounding different because they decided to put less vocals could have been done with other phonetic metaphors, without alienating people.
I say this because I KNOW how it feels in a constant basis. We play in spanish. Almost all roleplay literature is in English.
I do my share of hard work translating names to spanish (my first language): Fallcrest, Rivenfall, Waterdeep, Tardrum, Teiradrion. I know they work in English but not in spanish. If everything we did was in English it would work, but changing between them sometimes doesn't. So here come the Crestaverde, Rio Largo, Honda el Agua, Tarkon, Tercanon, etc.
The english language is very high. Latin languages have more graves in them.
Sometimes they sound stupid but if you think about Buenos Aires, Aguascalientes, Colorado... real names exist like that.
The point I am trying to make is... I have to do all of this because the roleplaying language is English. English speakers SHOULDN'T go what I go through. It's kind of obtuse if you ask me.
(I know how to speak spanish, english, japanese and russian...)
We play in German (well, a dialect of it) but we don't translate the names. It would feel jarring for me to use german names for a not-german fantasy culture. Same as in a modern game, we'd not translate Los Angeles or Buenos Aires.
Some names - especially african or asian ones - may be hard to pronounce or hard to remember, but that generally doesn't come up often. Once the characters are in a town, we seldom mention the town's name in conversation. Or its neighbour town. So, the complaint also feels a bit academical.
Kenzer delivers a campaign setting that doesn't feel like all areas of it were the same, just using different looks.
Now, if there was a game term that was hard to pronounce, or to remember, or simply too long, and it was something one would use every combat, that would be different. "Roll Kampfrundenreihenfolgetest" instead of "Roll Ini" would seriously grate.
Some names - especially african or asian ones - may be hard to pronounce or hard to remember, but that generally doesn't come up often. Once the characters are in a town, we seldom mention the town's name in conversation. Or its neighbour town. So, the complaint also feels a bit academical.
Kenzer delivers a campaign setting that doesn't feel like all areas of it were the same, just using different looks.
Now, if there was a game term that was hard to pronounce, or to remember, or simply too long, and it was something one would use every combat, that would be different. "Roll Kampfrundenreihenfolgetest" instead of "Roll Ini" would seriously grate.
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